pedantic nuthatch

Andy and I worked out that Lanford Wilson, a talented master of language, needs some help with his arithmetic. In Act II, Len explains to James what a good deal the artisan cheese business will be for him, the new owner of the cheese plant:

Len: I was a little short on my estimate. (With the ledger book and contract) You can see that provolone weighs out at ten pounds per one hundred pounds milk, little better—... There's your price for what four hundred thousand pounds of milk would have brought. And there's what they're paying for the forty-six hundred pounds of provolone that it made. Works out about a forty percent better return.

Now Len's point is that the revenue on the cheese (before paying for the additional capital equipment used to produce it) is 40% higher than what the raw milk would have fetched. Since he doesn't say what "your price" is, we have to take his word for that. But it's the calculation of how much cheese 400,000 pounds of milk would make that's off by an order of magnitude. Here's one way to revise the text so that the math works out.

Len: I was a little short on my estimate. (With the ledger book and contract) You can see that provolone weighs out at eleven pounds per one hundred pounds milk, little better—... There's your price for what four hundred thousand pounds of milk would have brought. And there's what they're paying for the forty-six thousand pounds of provolone that it made. Works out about a forty percent better return.

In fact, 400,000 pounds of milk x 11.5 pounds of cheese per 100 pounds of milk = 46,000 pounds of cheese.

Of course, James's decision to close down the operation is made for emotional reasons, not business ones, so this textual problem is, ultimately, moot.